SoylentNews

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

As part of its first major retrofit in 30 years, two custom-designed wind turbines have started generating power for the Eiffel Tower. Located above the World Heritage Site's second level, about 400 feet off the ground, the sculptural wind turbines are now producing 10,000 kWh of electricity annually, equivalent to the power used by the commercial areas of the Eiffel Tower's first floor. The vertical axis turbines, which are capable of harnessing wind from any direction, were also given a custom paint job to further incorporate them into the iconic monument's 1,000-foot frame. At the same time they bring the image of the 1889 tower firmly into the 21st Century.

[...]In addition to the wind turbines, the renovation includes energy efficient LED lighting, high-performance heat pumps, a rainwater recovery system, and 10 square meters of rooftop solar panels on the visitor pavilion.

There was no required renewable energy target for the Eiffel Tower's facelift, but the project developers see it as a major landmark in Paris' climate plan. The city's plan(PDF) aims for a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a 25 percent drop in energy consumption, and for 25 percent of energy to come from renewable energy sources by 2020.

martyb writes:

Thought other Soylents would be interested in this report I saw at IT World:

Google is scrapping Pwnium, its annual bug hunting event, and folding it into an existing year-round program in part to reduce security risks.

“If a security researcher was to discover a Pwnium-quality bug chain today, it’s highly likely that they would wait until the contest to report it to get a cash reward,” Willis wrote. “This is a bad scenario for all parties. It’s bad for us because the bug doesn’t get fixed immediately and our users are left at risk.”

Now, researchers who find bugs in Chrome products can submit them under the Chrome Reward Program, Willis wrote, which has been around since 2010.

Awards range from a minimum of US$500 up to $50,000, with an unlimited reward pool. But Willis cautioned that Google’s lawyers say the program is “experimental and discretionary” and could be cancelled or modified.

An Anonymous Coward (who then signed himself as Pr. L Muishkin) writes:

Google has announced their new Adult Content Policy for Blogger...

Starting March 23, 2015, you won't be able to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity on Blogger.

Note: We’ll still allow nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.

Changes you’ll see to your existing blogs:

If your existing blog doesn’t have any sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video on it, you won’t notice any changes.

If your existing blog does have sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video, your blog will be made private after March 23, 2015. No content will be deleted, but private content can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog and the people who the owner has shared the blog with.

They also explain how a blog can be exported, presumably for use should you wish to change hosts.

https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/6170671?p=policy_update&hl=en&rd=1

Unfortunately, one man's art is another man's porn - so if you run a photography blog or just have images taken on the beach during your holidays you might want to back-up your data or recheck its contents.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Michael Rosenwald writes in the WaPot that textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer reading on paper for pleasure and learning, a bias that surprises reading experts given the same group’s proclivity to consume most other content digitally. “These are people who aren’t supposed to remember what it’s like to even smell books,” says Naomi S. Baron. “It’s quite astounding.” Earlier this month, Baron published “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World,” a book that examines university students’ preferences for print and explains the science of why dead-tree versions are often superior to digital. Her conclusion: readers tend to skim on screens, distraction is inevitable and comprehension suffers. Researchers say readers remember the location of information simply by page and text layout — that, say, the key piece of dialogue was on that page early in the book with that one long paragraph and a smudge on the corner. Researchers think this plays a key role in comprehension - something that is more difficult on screens, primarily because the time we devote to reading online is usually spent scanning and skimming, with few places (or little time) for mental markers.

Another significant problem, especially for college students, is distraction. The lives of millennials are increasingly lived on screens. In her surveys, Baron writes that she found “jaw-dropping” results to the question of whether students were more likely to multitask in hard copy (1 percent) vs. reading on-screen (90 percent). "The explanation is hardly rocket science," says Baron. "When a digital device has an Internet connection, it’s hard to resist the temptation to jump ship: I’ll just respond to that text I heard come in, check the headlines, order those boots that are on sale." “You just get so distracted,” one student says. “It’s like if I finish a paragraph, I’ll go on Tumblr, and then three hours later you’re still not done with reading.”

n01 writes:

Stuttering — a speech disorder in which sounds, syllables or words are repeated or prolonged—affects more than 70 million people, or about 1% of the population, worldwide. Once treated as a psychological or emotional condition, stuttering can now be traced to brain neuroanatomy and physiology. Two new studies from UC Santa Barbara researchers provide new insight into the treatment of the speech disorder as well as understanding its physiological basis.

The first paper, published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, finds that the MPI stuttering treatment program, a new treatment developed at UCSB, was twice as effective as the standard best practices protocol.

The second study, which appears in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, uses diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) in an MRI scanner to identify abnormal areas of white matter in the brains of adult stutterers. According to co-author Janis Ingham, a professor emerita of speech and hearing sciences at UCSB and co-author of both papers, the two studies taken together demonstrate two critical points: A neuro-anatomic abnormality exists in the brains of people who stutter, yet they can learn to speak fluently in spite of it.

takyon writes:

FedEx is refusing to ship Texas nonprofit Defense Distributed's computer controlled mill, the Ghost Gunner. The $1,500 tool can carve aluminum objects from digital designs, including AR-15 lower receivers from scratch or more quickly from legally obtainable "80 percent lowers".

When the machine was revealed last October, Defense Distributed's pre-orders sold out in 36 hours. But now FedEx tells WIRED it's too wary of the legal issues around homemade gunsmithing to ship the machine to customers. "This device is capable of manufacturing firearms, and potentially by private individuals," FedEx spokesperson Scott Fiedler wrote in a statement. "We are uncertain at this time whether this device is a regulated commodity by local, state or federal governments. As such, to ensure we comply with the applicable law and regulations, FedEx declined to ship this device until we know more about how it will be regulated."

But buying, selling, or using the Ghost Gunner isn't illegal, nor is owning an AR-15 without a serial number, says Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. "This is not that problematic," he says. "Federal law does not prohibit individuals from making their own firearms at home, and that includes AR-15s."

Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson argues that rather than a legal ambiguity, FedEx is instead facing up to the political gray area of enabling the sale of new, easily accessible tools that can make anything-including deadly weapons. "They're acting like this is legal when in fact it's the expression of a political preference," says Wilson. "The artifact that they're shipping is a CNC mill. There's nothing about it that is specifically related to firearms except the hocus pocus of the marketing." Wilson, whose radically libertarian group has pursued projects ranging from 3-D printed guns to untraceable cryptocurrency, says he chose to ship his Ghost Gunner machines with FedEx specifically because the company has a special NRA firearm industry membership. But when he told a local FedEx representative what he'd be shipping, he says the sales rep responded that he'd need to check with a superior. "This is no big deal, right? It's just a mill," Wilson says he told his FedEx contact. "You guys ship guns. You've shipped 3-D printers and mills, right? You'll ship a drill press, right? Same difference."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.3, is out. Among the new features are:

• Electrum is an easy to use bitcoin wallet. You can use the Bitcoin Client persistence feature to store your Electrum configuration and wallet.
• The Tor Browser has additional operating system and data security. This security restricts reads and writes to a limited number of folders. Learn how to manipulate files with the new Tor Browser.
• The obfs4 pluggable transport is now available to connect to Tor bridges. Pluggable transports transform the Tor traffic between the client and the bridge to help disguise Tor traffic from censors.
• Keyringer lets you manage and share secrets using OpenPGP and Git from the command line.

One issue that the Tails team note specifically is that this release ships with NoScript version 2.6.9.14 instead of version 2.6.9.15, which is the version used in The Tor Project's own Tor Browser 4.0.4 release. Other issues can be found here.

The download page is here and the submitter reminds us all that, if we choose the BitTorrent download option, please seed afterwards to help other potential users to obtain a copy.

The security holes which affect Version 1.2.3 have been fixed.

AnonTechie writes:

A few hundred feet inside a permafrost-encrusted mountain below the Arctic circle sits the seed bank that could be humanity's last hope during a global food crisis. This month, scientists suggested that this unassuming vault is the ideal space for preserving the world's data on DNA.

This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a bunker on the Arctic island of Svalbard, which for the past seven years has amassed almost a half million seed samples from all over the world. The idea is to use the naturally freezing, isolated environment of the far north to preserve the world's plant life and agricultural diversity—which, of course, is under threat by climate change and disaster. If a food crisis occurs, the vault could provide the seeds that repopulate parts of the world.

But it could potentially preserve much more than seeds. A study in the German chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie this month details the quest to find out how long data stored on DNA could be preserved, and also suggests the vault as the ideal storage location.

http://gizmodo.com/the-isolated-vault-that-could-store-our-data-on-dna-for-1687457772

[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract

AnonTechie writes:

So-called patent trolls may actually benefit inventors and the innovation economy, according to a Stanford intellectual property expert. Stephen Haber ( https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/stephen-haber ), a Stanford political science professor, suggests in new research that concerns about too much litigation involving patents is misguided.

A patent troll is a person or company that buys patents – without any intent to produce a product – and then enforces those patents against accused infringers in order to collect licensing fees. Some say the resulting litigation has driven up costs to innovators and consumers.

To the contrary, Haber said, his research with Stanford political science graduate student Seth Werfel shows that trolls – also known as patent assertion entities, or PAEs – play a useful intermediary role between individual inventors and large manufacturers.

http://scienceblog.com/77142/patent-trolls-serve-valuable-role-in-innovation-stanford-expert-says/

[Abstract]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2552734

tonyPick writes:

Several tech sites have reports up on the new AMD Carrizo processor, with details coming out in a talk at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). In summary Carrizo is AMD's latest Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) device, is aimed at mobile devices, and combines four Excavator processors with eight Radeon GPU cores.

From AnandTech's initial reporting:

"gewg_" writes:

AndroidHeadlines reports

If you are not planning on buying the [Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition] but would like to see what the operating system is like, then it looks like the firmware is now available to download. Of course, getting this firmware to run on any device other than the E4.5 will be quite a chore, but that is unlikely to stop people trying. Not to mention, a forked version for other devices might become available in due course.

However, if you do own one of the original Android powered Aquaris E4.5 devices, then you might have more luck in getting this to work. If you are interested in giving the firmware a try, then you can download it by clicking here (automatic download). There are, unfortunately, no flashing instructions provided with the download and as such, this is a rather blind (and risky) install. Still, if you know what you are doing or know how to tinker with firmware, then maybe you will be able to do something with this one.

Softpedia has related news: Official Ubuntu Phone Porting Guide Published

Canonical has finally released the online Ubuntu Phone porting guide that should enable developers to get the Ubuntu Touch running on more devices out there that can easily support it.

The Ubuntu devs have been working on this porting guide for quite some time and now it's finally out. It underlines in great details all the steps and procedures that are needed in order to make the OS run on other devices than just Nexus 4, Nexus 7 2013, and Bq Aquaris. This tutorial should enable the community to come up with ports that even feature support for Over-The-Air (OTA) updates, which is actually a very important feature.

The online community has managed to get a few ports going without this tutorial. The best example is the port for Nexus 5, but there are many other phones out there that could easily run Ubuntu. The interest to port is there and a lot of projects have been [put] on hold, on XDA, because there wasn't complete information available.

In other related news, on February 11, ExtremeTech reported
The First Ubuntu Phone Sold Out Twice the First Day It Was For Sale

takyon writes:

Tom's Hardware claims that Microsoft's DirectX 12 will allow systems with multiple graphics cards to use a mix of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs simultaneously.

A source with knowledge of the matter gave us some early information about an "unspoken API," which we strongly infer is DirectX 12.

One of the big things that we will be seeing is DirectX 12's Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities. What this means is that the API combines all the different graphics resources in a system and puts them all into one "bucket." It is then left to the game developer to divide the workload up however they see fit, letting different hardware take care of different tasks. Part of this new feature set that aids multi-GPU configurations is that the frame buffers (GPU memory) won't necessarily need to be mirrored anymore. DirectX 12 [...] will work with a new frame rendering method called SFR, which stands for Split Frame Rendering. Developers will be able to manually, or automatically, divide the texture and geometry data between the GPUs, and all of the GPUs can then work together to work on each frame. Each GPU will then work on a specific portion of the screen, with the number of portions being equivalent to the number of GPUs installed.

The source said that with binding the multiple GPUs together, DirectX 12 treats the entire graphics subsystem as a single, more powerful graphics card. Thus, users get the robustness of running a single GPU, but with multiple graphics cards. We were also told that DirectX 12 will support all of this across multiple GPU architectures, simultaneously. What this means is that Nvidia GeForce GPUs will be able to work in tandem with AMD Radeon GPUs to render the same game — the same frame, even.

There is a catch, however. Lots of the optimization work for the spreading of workloads is left to the developers — the game studios. The same went for older APIs, though, and DirectX 12 is intended to be much friendlier. For advanced uses it may be a bit tricky, but according to the source, implementing the SFR should be a relatively simple and painless process for most developers.

Here is some previous reporting about DirectX 12 from Anandtech and ExtremeTech. DirectX 12 will be exclusive to Windows 10. Khronos Group's OpenGL successor glNext will be revealed at the Game Developers Conference 2015 on March 5th, in an event "presented by Valve".

frojack writes:

The Washington Post covers a study that suggests the Black Plague may not have been spread to Rats after all. Maybe it was the fault of gerbils.

History has long blamed the Black Rat for the spread of the plague (Black Death), and the fleas that accompanied them. The Plague was actually several events, suspected of originating in China, and spread by trade. DNA studies reveal slight differences between each infestation, indicating a re-introduction every 15 years or so.

The new study says that rat populations densities are heavily weather dependent, and they can find no correspondence between the weather and the rat population in Europe.

[More after the break...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As reported here at Soylent News some time ago, the Haskell programming language project's deb.haskell.org Debian build server was compromised. It is now over a week later, but the project's server status page still hasn't seen any additional updates posted.

At the time of submission, the latest update shown is the one from February 15, 2015:

February 15, 2015 1:07AM CST
February 15, 2015 7:07AM UTC
[Investigating] deb.haskell.org has been compromised; dating back to February 12th when suspicious anomalies were detected in outgoing traffic. `deb.haskell.org` was already offline and suspended shortly after these traffic changes were detected by the host monitoring system, meaning the window for package compromise was very very small.
We're continuing to investigate the breach and the extent to which it might have spread.

This lack of information will no doubt be concerning to any security-conscious individual, and will leave such an individual with many questions: Why is this investigation taking so long? Is the investigation still actually happening? Why are we not getting more frequent updates? Is there any risk that the other servers of the Haskell project have been compromised? Why is it taking so long to get a rebuilt Debian build system put together? Were any Debian packages compromised? Is there any risk to anyone who may have used these Debian packages recently?

Regardless of the answers to such questions, it is becoming clearer on a daily basis that these answers are needed, and needed quickly. Uncertainty is never a good thing when security is involved, and the reputation of Haskell will suffer if more information about this breach isn't presented to the community.